“My quotations from Newton suggest the motive which induced him to take a stand against the use of hypotheses, namely, the danger of becoming involved in disagreeable controversies. …Newton could no more dispense with hypotheses in his own cogitations than an eagle can dispense with flight. Nor did Newton succeed in avoiding controversy.”

— Florian Cajori

Explanatory Appendix, Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World (1934) Tr. Andrew Motte, p. 674

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Florian Cajori13

American mathematician 1859–1930

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 75

“God can dispense with us just as little as we can dispense with him.”

Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) German theologian

Gott kann uns ebensowenig entbehren wie wir ihn.
Sermon 49

“Huey P. Newton is the baddest motherfucker ever to set foot inside of history. Huey has a very special meaning to black people, because for four hundred years black people have been wanting to do exactly what Huey Newton did, that is, to stand up in front of the most deadly tentacle of the white racist power structure, and to defy that deadly tentacle, and to tell that tentacle that he will not accept the aggression and the brutality, and that if he is moved against, he will retaliate in kind. Huey Newton is a classical revolutionary figure.”

Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) American activist

Post-Prison Writings (1969)
1960s

“The first step is that we need to revisit the validity of Newton’s universal law of gravitation. Starting in the 1980s, Mordehai Milgrom at the Weizmann Institute in Israel showed that a small generalisation of Newton’s laws can yield the observed dynamics of matter in galaxies and in galaxy clusters without dark matter. This approach is broadly known as MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics). Milgrom’s correction allows gravitational attraction to fall off with distance more slowly than expected (rather than falling off with the square of distance as per Newton) when the local gravitational acceleration falls below an extremely low threshold. This threshold could be linked to other cosmological properties such as the ‘dark energy’ that accounts for the accelerating expansion of the Universe. These links suggest a deeper fundamental theory of space, time and matter, which has not yet been formulated.”

Pavel Kroupa (1963) Australian astrophysicist

[Pavel Kroupa, Has dogma derailed the scientific search for dark matter?, aeon.co, November 2016, https://aeon.co/ideas/has-dogma-derailed-the-scientific-search-for-dark-matter]

“There is no reason why an extraphysical general principle is necessarily to be avoided, since such principles could conceivably serve as useful working hypotheses.”

David Bohm (1917–1992) American theoretical physicist

Context: There is no reason why an extraphysical general principle is necessarily to be avoided, since such principles could conceivably serve as useful working hypotheses. For the history of scientific research is full of examples in which it was very fruitful indeed to assume that certain objects or elements might be real, long before any procedures were known which would permit them to be observed directly.

“Therefore alongside the ancient hypotheses, which are no more probable, let us permit these new hypotheses also to become known, especially since they are admirable as well as simple and bring with them a huge treasure of very skillful observations. So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.”

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) Renaissance mathematician, Polish astronomer, physician

Part of an unsigned foreword to Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, actually written by Andreas Osiander.
Misattributed

“I take it for granted there can be no controversy about what that resistance amounts to. It can only be done by levying war against the United States. The thing threatened is treason against the United States. There can be no controversy about that.”

Benjamin Stanton (1809–1872) American politician

Speech (1860)

“The predecessors of Newton and Leibnitz knew perfectly well how to determine tangents and areas, but they had to approach each problem from first principles. The great contribution of Newton and Leibnitz was precisely to make the procedures for finding tangents, areas, etc. into a calculus, that is, a systematic way of calculating—a collection of algorithms, to use the currently fashionable word.”

Ralph P. Boas Jr. (1912–1992) American mathematician

[Calculus as an Experimental Science, 78, 6, 1971, 664–667, The American Mathematical Monthly, 10.2307/2316582]

“Six imams removed from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix are calling on Muslims to boycott the airline. If only we could get Muslims to boycott all airlines, we could dispense with airport security altogether.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"What Can I Do To Make Your Flight More Uncomfortable? (22 November 2006) http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/printer_friendly.cgi?article=158 <br class="br">2006

“I do not mind at all that [Newton] is not a Cartesian provided he does not offer us suppositions like that of attraction.”

Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher

Letter to Fatio de Duillier (11 July 1687), quoted in René Dugas, Mechanics in the seventeenth century (1958), p. 440

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Florian Cajori13

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